It’s a huge responsibility for a company to be entrusted with facilitating thousands of monthly pension payments. In a complicated IT environment a solid process is essential.
Aquila Heywood is the largest UK provider of life and pensions administration systems and has been in operation for more than 40 years. It runs an award-winning software and service platform called Altair that is used by most local government authorities and many large and small private company schemes. The value of the Local Government Pension Scheme it handles is £300bn alone.
Altair offers an end-to-end solution, spanning functions such as bulk calculations, real-time management, document and data admin. At the same time it must comply with regulatory and legislative changes, such as the 2013 Public Service Pensions Act. “Twenty years ago, when it first launched, it was just a piece of software,” explains Steve Haslam, Aquila Heywood’s head of service operations. “These days, there’s so much more. We have hosting services, which most of our customers now use. There are portals, which allow individuals to check their pension projections and communicate with us.”
Aquila Heywood has one team of four who provide support for internal staff and external customers. They handle about 60-70 requests a day and see significant spikes around the end of the tax year, and when the company rolls out new software to customers.
There’s also a second team of experts that includes two people with a combined total of 80 years’ experience in local government. On top of that, there are about 40 software developers, plus consultancy teams and management.
Unlike a retail e-commerce operation, IT is crucial to both the front and back end of Aquila’s business, with customers relying on it to manage hundreds of thousands of payroll payments each month. Anything that involves a hardware failure or an outage around monthly payroll is a high-priority incident.
In 2012, it was clear there were some significant IT issues disrupting its business, specifically around prioritising incidents.
“It was a difficult environment and this was proving a recurring issue,” says Haslam. “There are incidents and problems. If a server crashes it’s an incident, you have to get it back online, but once it’s online do you look into the reasons it crashed? Has it happened before? How often? Should we follow up and improve it? At that point it’s become a problem. But it isn’t always necessary to follow up.
“However, when it happened, customers were contacting us and demanding to know more information, which was making the incidents harder to manage. To senior managers it looked like the services were still down because we were constantly having conversations with customers about incidents. It was like herding cats.”
In early 2013, Haslam attended an ITIL training day with a colleague. “As soon as I began to learn about it, I could see it was the way forward for us as a business. I came back and said we needed to take it on board and train our key staff. I had to make a case, but once the board could see the advantages they supported me.”
Half a dozen staff were trained and the ITIL framework was integrated into the business over a 12-month period.
ITIL’s principles of service, strategy and operation were applied to the main point of contention, which involved differentiating between incidents and problems and service requests, evaluating them correctly and maintaining proper records to see what the critical issues were.
“There’s a much closer working relationship between the service desk and our development team. We can now also update a large number of customers at once, which removes delay in communications. We have development meetings every morning and we also have a monthly hive when we down tools and get together and collaborate or run internal training sessions.
“Efficiency and stability greatly improved, and major incidents reduced significantly. The company now has a more accurate overview of events, so that information can be fed back into its business strategy.”
Haslam also used ITIL’s Continual Service Improvement principles to move the company forward.
“We have looked at every way to improve things. We gave the service desk a daily proactive task, and we have put in developments to improve the customer service software.”
Meanwhile, over the past six years, customer satisfaction scores for the service team have risen steadily.
“You can measure lots of metrics, but for me the most important one is what customers think of you,” says Haslam. “A lot of people are relying on us after all.”
For Haslam, ITIL continues to underpin his methods. “There’s a new update just launched, ITIL 4.0, and I’ve just taken part in an introductory webinar. There’s a lot about the value stream and agile ways of working that are really interesting and should prove invaluable long-term. It’s a constantly evolving process for us.”
To find out more about the most widely respected framework for service management, visit Built on ITIL
